Bodies in Okada

People with disabilities only appear in about half the chapters of No-No Boy; but throughout the novel, Okada sets the tone and characterizes people, in part, by the way he describes their bodies. When first we see Mama, for example, we quickly learn that "Hers was the awkward, skinny body of a thirteen-year-old which had dried and toughened through the many years following but which had developed no further" (10) --later, we learn about her arms and what their shape, color, and movement means to Ichiro. Indeed, the second paragraph of the novel establishes "ineradicable" physical difference --rather than, say, ancestry-- as a defining feature of the stigmatized Japanese-Americans. And although the rest of the novel is devoted to complicating that equation, we still see a great deal of energy spent on people's shape, color, posture, size, dress, and movement that not all fiction considers. Where did that kind of description make an impression on you?